A basic travel guide. I picked it first because of the photo on the cover and because I love Eyewitness books!

The scene where the airplane takes off in the desert and crashes was filmed in Tunisia. The site, located not far from Algeria, looks exactly as it did in the movie.

Washington correspondent Geyer fell in love with Tunisia for its forward approach to women's rights and progressive stance toward a modern Tunisia. A rare country among Muslim states. By the way, just a handful of women wear covers, mostly older women that I saw.

I traveled to Tunisia with a seminary group. One of the professors did his dissertation on Perpetua and her maid, Felicitas, both Christian martyrs because they would not renounce their faith. Made my hair stand on end.

St. Augustine, a Tunisian, was among the first to write that there is a Trinity. A church council met to discuss, then affirm this opinion. This decision also was among the first to begin Catholic tradition.

Because of geography, Tunisia was a hotbed in World War II. This was news to me until I went to Tunisia two years ago. There is even a huge American-owned cemetery I searched for and found graves belonging to a man from Louisiana and a woman who died in Tunisia during the war. (I am a woman from Louisiana, thus the interest)

We visited the ruins of many Roman homes, businesses, baths, coliseums from one end of Tunisia to the other. We visited a mosaic artisan and saw how time-consuming it is to make those tiny tiles then assemble them into patterns into large wholes. Awesome and beautiful!

Tunisians are known for their textiles, especially the Berbers from the desert. I bought an orange-themed carpet of symbols of the desert and desert life. Magnificent!

I could not find Tunisian cookbooks on Amazon, but North African cuisine is similar--a combination of native and French. Remember that France colonized all across North Africa. It was typical to find Tunisians who slip back and forth from Arabic to French and back.

I included this book because I saw so many fig, date, and olive trees. Date trees grow especially everywhere. Olive trees are nurtured in groves by the hundreds!In fact, Tunisia ranks third in the world in olive oil production. We had fresh dates everywhere. However, the figs would not be ready for a couple of months.